Nowadays, the stresses and strains of the working mother are the subject of almost continual comment, but what about the women who came before, the unscrutinised generations who combined work and motherhood decades ago? They were relatively rare, perhaps, but for that very reason they were pioneers.

Women such as Carola Grindea, 88, formerly a professor of music at the Guildhall, a concert pianist and still an internationally renowned teacher. Grindea refuses to call herself a career woman: "I'm just a person who loves doing things." A refugee from Romania during the second world war, Grindea gave birth to her only child, Nadia, in 1943. "I thought, what do I do with a baby? We were alone in this country. Our lives were not secure."

So she found a job in the BBC World Service, while her husband, a literary journalist and editor, looked after the baby. Away from Nadia for up to three nights a week, she recalls, "My last bulletin was at 5am, so I had to spend the night at the BBC. I would do the morning broadcast, and then leave to pick up the first underground train from the Temple at 5.50am." But, she adds, "It was wartime. All that mattered was coming out of it alive."

Until the second world war, working women of Grindea's generation faced strong prejudices, such as a "marriage bar" - which virtually banned women from continuing in professions once they were married.

Later, Grindea left the BBC and returned to her true love, music. She began to perform and teach more. "I would do a concert a month. Recitals at the Wigmore Hall. I was working on pieces at least two and half hours a day. Nadia would pull at my arm and say, 'I hate you practising. Either you go to the BBC or you practise.' She wanted me to be with her when I was with her, if you see what I mean. To play with her. Luckily, I had a close friend with a baby. One day she took the children to the park, the next day I would. Everyone was in difficulties."

Janet White, a farmer, does not see herself as unique, in success or in struggle, either. And yet her autobiography, The Sheep Stell, charts an extraordinary life of risk, labour and love. At 75, White is still working on her farm in Somerset, lambing, shearing and checking the sheep daily on foot or on a quad bike. White was one of a handful of women who, from a young age, wanted to be a farmer in her own right: "It wasn't considered feminine. Girls at agricultural college were taking dairying, horticulture and domestic science." There was only one other woman on White's general farming course.

In 1966, White took over the hill sheep farm - 55 hectares plus common grazing, later extended to 100 hectares. With a husband working away during the week, White managed the farm alone and brought up four children.

I'm longing to ask Grindea and White about stress, but sense that the word itself is wrong. Too modern, too weedy. I'm right: these formidable older women recoil from it. "Difficult? Of course it was difficult. But I managed," Grindea says, fixing me with a steady eye. White's laugh is even more disarming. "I took it in my stride. The older two would get the school bus, then I'd take the two little ones to work with me. I'd have one on a pony or on my back or all of us on a tractor. The children seemed to thrive on farm life."

Irene Bruegel, now a politics professor at South Bank University, started her first research job in 1968 - part of the first wave of women breaking into the then male world of universities. She has worked full time virtually ever since. Bruegel always knew she was going to work, because "my mother always worked. She was a doctor. I felt proud of her, she brought in all the money. I remember her tending to a big traffic accident on the North Circular [in London]. She went and sorted it all out." A supportive and competent mother was something all three have in common.

Interestingly, Bruegel notes that the greatest hostility towards her came from "women of a previous generation who felt they had to give up children to have a career. They said, 'We were forced to choose between work and family.' And I said, why should mothers choose? No one asks that of fathers.

"As someone who was part of the first wave of the women's movement the question for me was not, would I work but would I have kids? I remember thinking, I've got to show it could be done." And did she? "Oh, I managed," she says with a smile and a sigh. (Oh that sigh of the working mother! This surely is timeless.)

"I was well provided for. I'd been briefly a single parent so I had a nursery place. It helped having my mother to call on. My partner worked locally. I had a relatively flexible job. And I had friends staying with me - there were always people in the house." In other words, a thoroughly modern patchwork arrangement.

One of her earliest jobs was at the Architectural Association."There was no maternity provision. But I was lucky. I had Dan in August and I had to start teaching in October. I was breastfeeding in the morning, working all day, then breastfeeding again at night. One student asked me, 'Have you been smoking dope?' That was how exhausted I was."

Of course you manage, Bruegel says, "but you're thinking about your child all the time. You're always looking at your watch. I didn't get a lunch break, didn't go for a drink after work. I used to use this metaphor, about having all these pots on the boil."

Grindea, White and Bruegel are all attuned to how the same dilemmas play out today. All three see a big difference in what men will do: "Men would not be seen dead with a pushchair then," says Bruegel. They all think women have a much greater reach of ambition, can get to the top of their professions more easily. But they also think younger women are really up against it, particularly in the corporate world. Bruegel says, "You see them working 12 hours a day, with this drive to come top. For women who have children they have this impossible dilemma, between whether to go back to work and never see their child or just give up." Some choice.

White remembers how intimidating it was, "meeting male farmers en masse at market", and is pleased that there are more female farmers now. But as one door opens, another closes: "It's just so much harder to make small farms work now. Costs go up, but you don't get any more for a lamb than you did 10 or 15 years ago."

Bruegel confirms the way work has become harder. "We were lucky," she says, "we didn't have to keep churning out research." Modern gains - maternity leave, more rights to flexible working - are perhaps countermanded by the increasing pace of work. They also see new psychological demands placed on the modern mother. Grindea says, "There's so much analysing and worrying, so much attention paid to parenting. It has bad effects on the children."

But none of it contradicts Grindea's certainty that it was - and is - worth it. "A woman must be satisfied. We need work. It's not healthy psychologically to be always with children at home. And a woman who does satisfying work is better equipped to cope with motherhood. She comes home a richer person."